This All Happened (10 page)

Lydia tests the chowder and wonders if something is off. It tastes zingy, she says. Like putting your tongue on a battery.

I decide not to stay, and I can see she's relieved. You can take the chowder, she says. And I walk back up the hill. I pour out the chowder under a tree, where a dog like Tinker Bumbo will find it.

15      Lydia:You sure are spending a lot of time with Maisie. We're writers. We're conferring.

I realize I havent been discussing the novel with Lydia. The reason is she's so busy with scripts, with the play, with funding proposals for the film in the summer.

Lydia thinks the novel could make a good film. Scenes of Bob Bartlett in the north, walking over polar ice that is floating south. Of the
Karluk
sinking, the phonograph playing. Of Rockwell Kent being accused of spying for the Germans. When I describe these images she gets excited, more excited than me. And I realize she's good for egging me on. She's much better at story than I am.

16      Just showered after a run with Lydia. Shaved a minute off Quidi Vidi, and much easier even though I ran feeling a little sore in the shins. A calm night, the lights of Pleasantville in bright focus. The oil tanks hidden behind a point of land, only the glow of lights on the bank behind them. The whole hill a dull apple-cider glow to protect the tanks from vandals.

Not a soul anywhere.

We stop at Lydia's. When she peels off her running shoes I see she has a pair of Chinese slippers inside. The shoes are too big, she says. I love how her elbows move close to her hips when she jogs. There's something oriental in all that.

We kiss and I continue on up Long's Hill. The greys and blacks. No colour except in blurred pools around streetlights in the distance, showing shingles on the edges of houses.

I run past Theatre Pharmacy, where we hugged that first Christmas and I had the rolling pin down my pants. Feel that, I'd said.

Oh, my.

I had her, for a moment. When she didnt know my body. Starlings are walking through a grassy hill, eating insects. Green is the garbage of gardens. They are sloughing off green.

17      At Coleman's grocery store. The distorted women, freakshow faces, warped eyebrows, blotchy complexions about four of them, their tiny husbands pushing carts. A pregnant woman with groceries. She comes out with the bags and there's a man in the passenger seat, waiting, staring at the glovebox, defeated, with a nine-year-old in the back, and the pregnant woman, struggling into the door, forces her belly behind the wheel, pained, drives.

Thin legs on the women, big torsos, and their pushed-in, beaten faces, receding chins, thin hair crimped artificially. Then calling taxis, paying with Government of Newfoundland blue cheques that require MCP and SIN and theyre worth $301.50 and theyre buying cases of Pepsi, Spaghettios, tins of vienna sausages, cold pre-fried barbecue wings, I can barely write this as it's all so cliche.

18      It's 3 a.m. and Wilf Jardine will not leave Lydia's party. We have to con him. Trouble is, he is used to this game and is wily, wary of deception. He cranks up the music another decibel. I tell him that he has to go now. That I'll go with him. We can go down to the Spur, I say.

Wilf faces me, drunk and wincing. He is drinking shine, panty remover, he calls it. There is a yellow stain on his lapel. It makes the tweed in his coat look like sandwich spread. I'll go to the Spur, he says. But not with you.

He turns to Lydia.

Lydia: I'll go with you, Wilf.

That's better, he says. No offence, Gabe.

I call a cab and we wait in the porch. Silent.

We get in the cab and head to the Spur. Halfway down he changes his mind.

Wilf: I want to go home.

He rolls down his window and yells at some Filipino sailors.

Naw, let's keep her rolling.

We end up at the Spur and Alex is there and I sit with Alex while Lydia takes care of Wilf at the bar. I have my hand around Alex. Craig Regular comes over to talk to Wilf and Lydia, and he makes Lydia's head bend back in laughter.

Alex says, Wilf Jardine has written one good song. When you hear that song, you know Wilf is worth it.

Alex believes if you pray for someone and that person doesnt know youre praying for them, the prayer can still work. She reads fantasy novels set in utopian times. All this I find unattractive.

Wilf, she says, wants only visitors who need his help. You ever been in his house? He owns no plants.

Craig Regular is buying Wilf and Lydia a drink.

You want a drink, Alex?

19      Something in me makes me run at night.

I was exhausted, back from a dinner party at Maisie's new place. I walked through the mist and the darkness and the quiet of Sunday night. I like returning home slowly, to end the night with a known destination.

Lydia's right: Maisie looks good since leaving Oliver. She hitchhiked across the island to see her sister. One man who picked her up asked math questions like: Say you have one brick . . . Another kept stopping into museums and said, Oh, I've got a better one of those at home in the garage. There was a tire leak and the first guy tried to figure out an equation that would predict the rate of deflation.

20      I call Mom as it's her birthday. She said, Your dad came in to the kitchen, bent his knees a little, put his hands on my shoulders, and sang Happy Birthday.

I say, Youre now twice my age.

She hadnt realized I was this old.

Whenever I call her she offers me advice. And today she says she's decided never to pretend to a motive that's false. Someone once accused her of stealing money. She denied it. Then she decided to make a joke of it. She said, How else am I supposed to get by on what I make? She says, When you do that, it leaves an impression on the person. That youre capable of stealing. Before the utterance she was beyond reproach.

I think about the underwear. When I mentioned to Lydia they could belong to a lover, she accepted it. This made the idea ridiculous. But now I'm thinking of it again.

21      I asked Max what he thought of being a father. He's excited. I know he hadnt wanted children, but now he's eager. He has all the books.

We dine at the old Victoria Station. Every year it's a new restaurant, but we still call it the Victoria Station, or 290 Duckworth. Tonight it's serving Caribbean and Mediterranean food. I order stifado, a Greek beef in cinnamon broth. Max the Moroccan lamb. But the tapas are best, scallops in the half shell basted in basil, cold marinated halibut in shredded red cabbage, shrimp in red sauce. A litre of red wine.

Max drives to his place and we play chess. And then I walk home. It takes twelve minutes to walk home from Max's, through the basilica grounds. The cold, silent night. I am tired. I wake up with the shock of a cat sniffing my face. Then I remember Iris is taking care of one.

22      On Lydia's deck I can hear a delicate cheep from the neighbour's soffit. I make coffee but decide to abstain. I lean over the rail. I can distinguish three distinct bird voices. A family has begun. A little family of three. I had told Max again how I want to get married, how Lydia is hesitant. Max said the same thing happened with Daphne: She said it was too early. And so I got her pregnant.

What?

A little hole in the condom. Works great.

Are you suggesting

I'm suggesting you force her hand. You want to get married, you want to have a kid, that's obvious.

What's so obvious about it?

The way you are with Una.

Two deep cheeps and a little high cheep.

23      Lydia and I walk along the river with Tinker Bumbo and Una. We have Una for the afternoon. And Una wants to be with Lydia. Una looks at Lydia with the eye of wonder. Lydia is a woman, a woman not her mother. Mothers dont count. It's sunny but chilly and we look at the houses along Circular Road. We stop in one driveway and speak to a Mrs Chafe. We admire the daphne and the sherbet yellow forsythia, both of which flower before growing leaves.

I wonder, I say, if that means anything about Daphne. Does she bloom before her leaves come out?

Una asks if these are oak trees. The branches are bare, so it's hard to tell. I am studying the bark on the trunks. Mrs Chafe picks up last year's fallen leaf and says no. An oak leaf has a coastline rivulet.

I would never have thought, in spring, to pick up last year's leaf.

24      Alex Fleming's studio overlooks Water Street. I can see the first three letters in the Esso tank farm. She has turned from her computer and drafting table. The screen is sophisticated. She is a woman with a lot of software.

I show her the poems I've written on the seven deadly sins. Her gaze turns professional. For the first time she is looking, in my presence, at something coldly.

Theyre very good, she says. I can work with these.

Her apartment is devoted to small art objects. Bits of rusted metal on the fireplace mantel. The hearth filled with wooden dolls. Images from magazines have been cut out and spliced. I can see a corner of her high bed behind an open door in the hall.

Alex will build seven objects to accompany my text. She says,You and Maisie are the first writers I've mentioned it to. I want to get Max in on it as well. I think it'll be you and me, and Max and Maisie.

Alex wears dark clothes, even at badminton. She smokes. There is a sinister note within her goodness. How she bends over to a serve, and looks me in the eye.

25      We pick up Max and Daphne and drive up the shore to hunt down icebergs. It's twenty-one degrees. I can feel the colour come to my face. The profiles of icebergs. A pair are linked in a green seawater gleam under the surface and I think of Lydia and me standing like that, at a distance but joined surreptitiously. One looks like a Spanish galleon, another the head of a rooster, complete with comb. A third is a lilting ocean liner. We turn shapes into objects. We do it to clouds, to rock formations.

We picnic on the grey sun-baked cliffs of Bay Bulls out on Bread and Cheese Point. Thick sandwiches and expensive leaf lettuce and a bottle of French red and crunchy pickles and ice creams and the orange guitar.

The hard wine bottle clunking against the rock.

26      There is a lawn on Waterford Bridge Road shot through with blue crocuses. I watch Lydia admire them. She has a soft spot for oddities in nature.

But then a hardness appears. We're in her kitchen. I had finished washing the dishes and she turned on the faucet with a dishcloth, getting in my way, and the cloth wiped my sleeve leaving a grease mark and I backed away, got my stuff from upstairs the tap still on in the kitchen. I ask, Do you want the tap on? Lydia: No. In a tone that says,You left it on.

I ask if anything's bothering her.

I wish you'd taken a loaf from the freezer when you finished the bread. Is that too much to ask?

I havent had any bread.

And she gives me a look that says I dont admit to anything.

27      I decide to walk down to Lydia's without phoning first. The door is locked and I have to ring. She is there with Earl Quigley and Craig Regular, having a toke. Craig tried to get back into the States, but they found marijuana on him at the border. She'd made them supper.

Lydia: I was just about to call you.

This is her second most favourite phrase. Her first favourite is, So what's your point?

I realize I am taking the annoying side of every issue.

I size up the waist size of both Earl and Craig. I notice the underwear is gone now from the detergent box.

I recall that Lydia admitted she felt a little alone. That Earl and Craig allow her to laugh, to be connected. And here I am standing in the kitchen looking at these two men eating supper with Lydia, sharing a spliff, and I must be talking but my concentration is on remembering Earl's professional accents that Lydia falls into, of Lydia laughing when Craig holds her arms so she can't answer the phone.

If I were holding Lydia, she would be pissed off.

All night I'm quiet until Lydia inquires. I say,You dont find what I have to say interesting. When I tell how my father couldve been an excellent burglar

Gabriel, youve said that a number of times.

Did I ever tell you? Because I'd felt like I'd told you, but you were silent.

Gabe, youve told me dozens of times that your father would say this is what a burglar would do. Do you want me to be entranced with everything you keep repeating?

Just tell me if I'm boring you. But saying nothing.

Lydia, on an elbow, says how unfair that is, thirty times I must have told her that, what do I expect from her. What I expect is for her to say,You'd be driving along like this? Would your brother be with you? Where would you be driving? Out of town? And he'd just scan the houses, or would he point one out in particular? Did your mother know he thought this way? Did you ever think he'd do it? Do you think it affected Junior? Etc. When Lydia talks about her family I'm interested, I ask these kinds of questions, I draw the stories out of her, I make her embellish. I ask for things. Whereas Lydia nods, or changes the subject, or says, So what's your point? Lydia will never be on the phone long with me, and never laugh as hard as she does with Wilf or Craig or Oliver.

How mean and small of me.

She curls around me. But my lower legs are aching. So I sleep on the couch. So I can massage my legs and move freely without waking her. At seven-thirty I go back to her bed. Get up at 9:20. I make bagels and coffee. Lydia says, Dont be sad. I say, It's a physical thing. She says,Yeah, I'm gonna take care of that physical thing.

28      I havent had a cup of coffee in a week. The last four days a headache. I hate picturing Lydia toking then passing the toke on. It's an intimate act.

Lydia was clearing up garbage behind the house and came across the dead baby starling. I pick it up. It's about two inches long, a big bum, featherless except for a tuft ball on its back, soft, little pink arm, no wings but claws, its yellow beak is not hard, ringed around its mouth like a duck's. All the promise of summer has left the nest in the soffit above.